Orange Heart and Winter Sports for 2017. Dinosaurs? Maybe.
Three new emoji candidates were approved at the 147th Unicode Technical Committee meeting, held in the week of May 9 at Adobe HQ in San Jose.
A proposal to Expand Emoji Professions gained considerable attention globally, and some other less publicised proposals were heard.
Approved
The following emojis were approved as candidates[1] for inclusion in Unicode 10.0 at UTC #147:
Above: Orange Heart has been added to the Unicode 10.0 candidate list.
These are in addition to the five existing candidates for Unicode 10, which are:
Proposed
Emoji proposals that were heard at UTC #147 included:
- Expanding Emoji Professions
- Farming
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Health Care
- Technology
- Business
- Education
- Food Service
- Rock Star
Above: Proposed new emojis for professions to better represent women.
- Jurassic Emoji
- T-Rex Head
- Bronto Head
- Triceratops Head
Above: Three dinosaurs proposed for encoding as emojis.
Above: Proposed Three Fingered Salute emoji images.
None of these proposals were accepted as-is, but have been referred to the Emoji Subcommittee to look at how these might fit into broader emoji proposals.
Suspended
Work on Unicode Emoji Mechanisms has been 'temporarily suspended'. This includes:
- TR-52 proposed mechanisms for tagging emojis with gender, hair color or direction attributes
- TR-52 proposed subregion flag support
The highest priority item (gender) is still on the cards, but with the implementation now planned to use the ZWJ sequence approach, as proposed in the separate Expanding Emoji Professions proposal.
Relevant statement from Unicode:
Work on Proposed Draft UTS #52, Unicode Emoji Mechanisms, has been temporarily suspended. An alternative approach using ZWJ for representing female emoji will pursued. Using a ZWJ mechanism would allow for shorter development time and better fallback behavior on older systems.
Regarding the other features of TR-52; the Unicode Technical Committee will:
...pursue alternative approaches for expanding the representation of flags and addressing hair color.
This means that flags for England, Scotland, and Wales are back off the agenda for now.
Bumped
Emoji candidates for Unicode 9.0 no longer coming to an emoji keyboard near you:
Above: Modern Pentathlon and Sporting Rifle won't be emojis in Unicode 9.
These will not be recommended for emoji presentation by vendors when the final version of Unicode 9 is released next month.
Due to the late stage that these were removed; the actual characters will still be encoded (with the same codepoints used in the beta of Unicode 9), but only as pictographs. The result will be these are unlikely to be displayed in color, nor shown on emoji keyboards[2].
Next
Unicode 9.0 is expected to be released with the remaining 72 emoji characters in the next month.
The term "candidate" in this context previously involved assigning codepoints, which may now take place later in the process (for any emojis approved for inclusion in a final release) ↩︎
If they are included in fonts at all. Modern Pentathlon in particular is quite the challenge to display at small sizes. ↩︎